Pasta e ceci is cooked all over Italy, but it is one of the few savory dishes that accounts of Sammarinese cooking name again and again: chickpeas and noodles in broth, flavored with garlic and rosemary. On Monte Titano it is a dish of the farmhouse and the cold months, and in San Marino the noodles were traditionally homemade, rolled from egg pasta and cut into short strips. It is cheap, nourishing and made from what is in the cupboard, which is how most of the world's great soups began.

Part of the chickpeas are puréed into the broth so that the soup becomes thick and velvety, almost a stew. With canned chickpeas it is ready in about 40 minutes; with dried chickpeas soaked overnight it is better still. Either way it is the quiet, sustaining bowl to have on the stove during a long spring race.

The soup

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup (60 ml) extra virgin olive oil
• 1 small onion
• 1 small carrot
• 1 celery stalk
• 3 garlic cloves
• 2 sprigs fresh rosemary
• 1 tablespoon tomato paste
• 2 cans (15 oz / 425 g each) chickpeas
• 5 cups (1.2 liters) vegetable broth or water
• 1 teaspoon fine salt
• 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
• 1 cup (150 g) short pasta such as maltagliati or ditalini
• 1 pinch crushed red pepper flakes

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